(13) The Entertainment District
The next day had gone reasonably well. Well enough that by mid-afternoon, with Asha safely ensconced in Bridget’s basement apartment, and seemingly happy with the set-up, most especially since the adults had dropped their previous insistence on police intervention, for the time being anyway, Andrew had begun to experience a vague, very vague, sense of queasiness, as if they hadn’t earned their smooth sailing.
As he was dropping him off at the GO station Jordan had encouraged him to quit being distracted by his own doubts. Live every minute to the fullest my friend, he instructed, waving a quick goodbye, then there’s no space for the nasty little squiggles to squeeze in. Andrew shook his head in something he wished was manly rebuttal, and drove out of the parking lot just ahead of several transit buses, feeling like he was chasing his own tail.
Lara had insisted on walking the short distance from Bridget’s to her own place, so there were, in fact, no further rides to give, and as he pumped gas as carelessly as a man who owned his own oil well, he felt suddenly free. Of course years of hanging with Jordan, the Beatles fanatic, made him think of the line, ‘Oh that magic feeling…what was it…‘nowhere to go’? Ah yes, all you needed was memory.
Pulling into the driveway and seeing Clean Sweep’s vehicle got him to immediately reverse and drive downtown, where a latte and today’s Globe might make his unexpected pleasure complete. Even now it was the simple things that made a difference, and maybe he should be grateful for that. Yes, he decided, walking up Dunn and along Robinson to the town centre where Bean and Gone had cleverly parked itself years ago, cynical and jaded was not on his radar, and should never be. Could he find enough causes and projects to keep himself committed to something other than self-gratification? Well he seemed busy enough now. Here he was ecstatic over a spare hour or two.
A couple of the Bean regulars were seated by the door as he waltzed in. One of them, English chap whose name he couldn’t quite pinpoint, asked him how he was and where he’d been. As they bantered Andrew recalled the man’s liking for outspoken journalists like John Pilger and, that other one, what was his name? Also he could not forget his own rejoinder concerning such righteous lefties who assumed the high moral ground of their own pontifications were unassailable, or something like that. The man’s companion, looking vaguely familiar, mentioned that their afternoon might be radically altered if the bomb went off. Apparently there were two suspicious suitcases standing outside the CSIS building on Front Street that the bomb squad were frantically working on.
Andrew considered the bifurcating paths this could represent. A stupid misunderstanding that would be forgotten quickly in the mad onrush of the 24 hour news cycle? The moment when Canada would finally realise it was truly up to its neck in the bad karma of her witless support of US imperialism? Or yet another Muslim gang that couldn’t shoot straight, that the agencies had been monitoring for months waiting for them to do something indictable? He joked with the lads about the chronically unstable stock market and then took a seat in the back where he could read undisturbed. Oh, that magic feeling.
There were snow storms in western Europe closing down airports and freezing water pipes. Some towns were being forced to truck in clean water at great expense for their citizens. Andrew thought of all the exterior piping he’d lived with as a child. Was global warming actually cooling things down? Sometimes it seemed like it. The automobile industry seemed to have resuscitated itself. Nice going there boys. See what a cash infusion can do? It had rained frogs somewhere, thousands of them and several reputable sources insisted it wasn’t all that unusual. A headline about vaccinations and autism caught his attention. That British researcher who had opened the can of worms years back, it looked like the forces of respectable research were coming in for the kill, finally. Andrew’d been expecting it for years. Don’t upset those big apple carts, or the big guns of medical science will take you out. These were the guys who didn’t take too kindly to Semmelweiss’s suggestion that washing your hands before delivering babies might just be a good idea. On the other hand, maybe they were right to burn all Wilhelm Reich’s books in the fifties. Dangerous radical that Willi.
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